A Natural Painter’s Singular View of the Natural World

Bill Lynch’s Paintings Get a Show at White Columns

Bill Lynch's "Untitled (Branches With Clouds Above and Below)" is one of his works at White Columns.Credit
White Columns

Genius lands where genius will, and I’m pretty sure some alighted on Bill Lynch. His ineffably elegant, tender-tough paintings on salvaged plywood, seen at White Columns in his first formal solo exhibition in New York, are a delight, one of the season’s sleepers. With their calligraphic brushwork, shifting cultural quotations and eccentric (and knotty) painting surfaces, these personal variants of landscape and still life painting also form a largely inadvertent coda to the painting of the 1980s.

The show has been organized by the painter Verne Dawson, who met Mr. Lynch while they were studying art at Cooper Union. In addition to being a debut, it is unexpectedly posthumous: Mr. Lynch, who was born in New Mexico in 1960 and grew up in New Jersey, died last year of throat cancer, at 53. Given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, he refused medical treatment throughout his life. He lived in New York until the mid-1990s, eking out a living, then spent a few years in the Mill Valley, Calif., area before returning to New York and then relocating to North Carolina to be near his family.

Almost from the instant you enter the White Columns show, you know that you are in the presence of a natural painter, one, for the most part, supremely at ease with his instincts. At its best, his touch communicates a tangible warmth for, and attention to, all things natural and cultural, with the golden plywood helping to raise the temperature.

Reflecting frequent visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his close-up depictions of plants, birds, butterflies and spider webs suggest the elegant undergrowth of Chinese painting. Elsewhere, he seems to mash together the pictorial argot of ceramics and textiles, as in the intimation of embroidered silk (and de Kooning) in the black and reds of “Untitled (Looking Up).”

“Untitled (Branches With Clouds Above and Below)” consists of plants framed top and bottom by bold ripples and curls applied with brush loads of blue and white paint; it makes you think of Japanese screens and prints, as well as blue and white ceramics from China. In “Untitled (Chinese Jar),” one vessel, more white than blue, is tethered by a line to a smaller one, as if it were a resistant dog on a leash.

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Sometimes Mr. Lynch’s subjects emerge gradually from dark backgrounds, like three small statues in one painting that might be a gathering of different cultures and religions. Or there is a lovely ambiguity, as in “Untitled (Trees and Red Landscape Reflect in Water),” which evokes pillows as much as trees. In “Untitled (Landscape With Cherry Blossoms),” a tiny figure stands on a narrow ellipse of white, a traveling monk perhaps, but also a deity on an altar.

Clearly, Mr. Lynch took inspiration from his plywood, elaborating a knot into an insect; tilting it into the illusion of a tabletop; or letting an especially visible moiré pattern function as water — the case with a stand of bamboo and other plants that frame a distant pagoda.

Mr. Lynch’s life and work are illuminated by reminiscences by Mr. Dawson and another friend, Michael Wilde, who owns several of the artist’s paintings. Mr. Wilde has also assembled excerpts from Mr. Lynch’s wise, if sometimes elliptical, letters, the openness of which often matches the fluctuations of his images: “The thousand words I put into the pictures I’ve painted in your collection could never be the match for the words you hear, but I’d love to witness how our visions overlap.”

A version of this review appears in print on October 18, 2014, on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: A Natural Painter’s Singular View of the Natural World. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe